Amazon employees gather outside its Seattle headquarters Wednesday during a walkout against a return-to-office mandate, recent layoffs and the company’s environmental impact. JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images
Amazon employees protested the company’s return-to-office mandate this week. That doesn’t seem to bother the tech giant too much.
“We’ve always listened and will continue to do so, but we’re pleased with the first month that we’ve got more people in the office,” Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser told Fortune.
In February, CEO Andy Jassy sent a memo saying remote workers should return to the office on May 1. “We should be back in the office together most of the time (at least three days a week),” he wrote.
Pamela Hayter, an employee, told workers who gathered at Wednesday’s strike that her “heart sank” when she read the announcement, “because I immediately realized the negative impact it was having on my family would have.”
Working from home, she explained, has allowed her to spend more time with her family than she thought possible before the pandemic.
“We don’t have to spend hours of our lives in traffic or in an office building,” she told those gathered on Wednesday.
Glasser told Fortune that since the return-to-office mandate went into effect, “there’s been more energy, collaboration and outreach, and we’ve heard that from many employees and the businesses that surround our offices.”
Earlier this year, Hayter launched an internal Slack channel for employees to express support for remote work. In her speech, she described the channel as the largest concrete expression of employee dissatisfaction in Amazon’s history.
Former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield expressed his views on such “slacktivism” in a recent conversation with Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast. “People’s superior ability to have conversations at work will also include conversations managers sometimes wish they hadn’t,” he said.
But with the big tech layoffs and economic uncertainty, people are now “more concerned about job security, so there’s less – and I’m not saying that’s necessarily a good thing – but there’s less work organization at Slack than would otherwise be the case.” was two years ago.”
Amazon downplayed the attendance at the headquarters strike, estimating the crowd at 300 people (organizers estimated the number was higher), noting that the company has 65,000 business and technology workers in the Puget Sound region and 350,000 worldwide. The strike also included employees protesting the company’s environmental impact and recent layoffs.
Jassy isn’t the only one asking his employees to go back to the office. Bob Iger at Disney, Howard Schultz at Starbucks and Robert Thomson at News Corp are among many others. Last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk called working from home morally reprehensible and argued the “laptop class” was unfair when it demanded privileges that other people, like service workers or factory workers, couldn’t enjoy.
And Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said at a Stripe conference last month, “I think one of the worst mistakes the tech industry has made in a long time was definitely that everyone could work completely remotely forever… I’d say that’s the end of the experiment.” is.”
At Uber competitor Lyft, new CEO David Risher recently ordered telecommuters back to the office a day after laying off more than 1,000 employees, or about 26% of the workforce.
In March, Amazon announced it would lay off 9,000 employees, adding to the 18,000 job cuts it made earlier this year and last November.
Despite return-to-office orders, large swathes of office buildings across the country are still partially empty. Shark tank star and real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran agreed with Musk warning this week that “commercial real estate is melting fast.”
“Nobody really believes there will be a turning point. People are staying home,” Corcoran told Fox Business’s The Claman Countdown.
Many remote workers claim that working from home is perfectly fine in terms of productivity. In a recent Pew Research poll, 56% of respondents said working from home helps them get work done and meet deadlines, while 37% said it neither helps nor hurts.
“We can be productive, customer-centric, we can do our good work, we can make a difference, and it doesn’t have to be in an office building,” Hayter said at the strike this week.
However, Amazon remains true to its mission.
“We understand that it will take time to get used to working in the office again,” Glasser said. “Many teams across the company are working hard to make this transition as smooth as possible for employees.”